The Kodansha Fallout: More Manga Changes?

Although the tsunami wave known as manga has taken the publishing world
by storm, in its country of origin, Japan, sales (while still healthy
and robust when compared to the American comics market) have been
trending downward for the last few years as regular readers apparently
find other entertainment on which to spend their yen.

In the US, according to the New York Post, manga accounted for $205 million of the $330 million American graphic-novel business in 2006 while ICv2
reported that manga sales grew from $175-$200 million in 2006 to $210
million last year. Although it was only an increase of a mere 5%, the
lowest growth rate for manga since the site began tracking manga sales,
there was an increase of 25% in the number of new manga releases from
1208 in 2006 to 1513 in 2007.

Is it any wonder that manga juggernauts are setting up bases in the US?

Two of Japan’s manga powerhouses, Shogakukan and Shueisha, are already doing business in the US through Viz Media.

On July 1, Japan’s Nikkei
announced that Kodansha has set up Kodansha USA with a $2 million
capital with Executive Vice-President Yoshinobu Noma heading the New
York office. “The move is an effort to strengthen the revenue for
copyrighted titles by moving from American publishers and selling
directly into the American market” starting in September. The news
report was first picked up by ICv2 and a translated version of the original report can be read here. Kodansha has books licensed to both Del Rey and Dark Horse.

Over at the Del Rey Manga blog, Dallas Middaugh posted
that it’s “business as usual at Del Rey Manga. We’re continuing to
license manga from Kodansha, and as has been stated elsewhere, we’ve
just about wrapped up our licenses for 2009 and are now starting to
work on 2010. In a few weeks at the San Diego Comic-Con we’ll be
announcing some of those new licenses, and we’ve got some really
exciting new manga series planned. Then we’ll have a few more
announcements at the New York Anime Festival in September… pretty much
like we’ve always done. Also, we will continue to publish all of our
manga. Kodansha has not pulled any licenses back from us.”

That said, rumors are floating that Kodansha is doing the opposite,
that is, that they will no longer be licensing books to Del Rey or Dark
Horse, and will set up their own publishing house in the US. The “rumor” was “squashed” by Del Rey’s Ali Kokmen, though it still seems to be echoing among observers.

Newsarama.com conducted an industry wide poll and here’s what each of
them has to say about Kodansha USA, where they see the manga market in
the US heading in the next two to three years, and whether or not
Original English Language (OEL) or global manga is the way to go from
now on.

But first, here’s a rough history lesson on all things Kodansha in the US

1988 – Epic Comics, a division of Marvel Comics, published the first-ever US edition of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. The 38-issue run was in full color and the issues were collected in six trade paperback volumes.

1995 – Dark Horse released the first issue of the translated Ghost in the Shell manga.

Paul Pope, an American alternative comic book artist, began working for Kodansha where he developed Supertrouble for the publisher’s weekly manga magazine, Morning. He spent his next five years there learning the art of manga but none of the works done had been published.

1997 – Mixx, before it became known as TokyoPop, started translating Kodansha titles and publishing English editions of the Sailor Moon, Ice Blade, Magic Knight Rayearth and Parasyte in the MixxZine anthology magazine.

(Note: As of May 2005, TokyoPop's license to the Sailor Moon manga has lapsed and earlier volumes are currently out of print.)

2000 – Dark Horse began reprinting and releasing Akira in its entirety in six black and white volumes.

Dark Horse debuted Super Manga Blast, a super-sized manga anthology series which serialized several Kodansha series like Oh! My Goddess, What’s Michael, Shadow Star, 3x3 Eyes, Seraphic Feather, Cannon God Exaxxion, Club 9, and Appleseed Hypernotes.
After 59 issues, Dark Horse cancelled the Eisner- and
Harvey-award-nominated publication with the last issue (#59) released
in March 2006.

2001 – According to Robert Boyd of LPC, if Sailor Moon, which were then translated and released by TokyoPop, were listed with graphic novels, it would easily have topped Marvel's Ultimate X-Men collection.

2007 – In July, Kodansha announced that Fred Gallagher’s Megtokyo will be published in a Japanese-language edition as part of the publisher’s Kodansha Box editions) in 2008.

Canadian-born artist Takeshi Miyazawa got rejected by Kodansha. It’s not so easy to break into the manga business after all.

June 23, 2008 – Kodansha’s Morning 2 debuted TokyoPop’s Rising Stars of Manga winner Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo,
making him the first non-Japanese creator to have his comic series
published in a monthly Japanese comic book magazine. Looks like it’s
not impossible after all.

July 1, 2008 – Kodansha USA was incorporated.

In the first part of a series of features, we heard from
representatives from Del Rey Manga, TokyoPop and Dark Horse about their
views on Kodansha setting up its base in the US and how the manga
publishing landscape will be affected by it.

Del Rey

2009 is a big year for Del Rey as it marks the company’s fifth
anniversary and Associate Publisher Dallas Middaugh said that “While
growth in the manga category has definitely slowed, we see
opportunities to build and expand the existing fan base. Over the next
two to three years, we anticipate stability and slow growth for manga
overall.

According to Middaugh, Del Rey has only acquired three original projects (The Reformed by Christopher Hart and Anzu, Kasumi by Kasumi Surt Lim and Hirofumi Sugimoto, and Yokaiden by Nina Matsumoto) and five licensed projects (Avril Lavigne, X-Men and Wolverine, Dean Koontz’s In Odd We Trust and Terry Brooks’ Dark Wraith of Shannara). “Our original manga program has always been based on one thing, and that’s the quality of the underlying work. Reformed and Avril
have performed well for us, and we have high hopes for the rest,” he
continued. “I realize that it may be tempting to see TokyoPop’s
experience with “OEL” manga as some kind of broad statement about the
category, but I don’t think it really is. Original manga is just like
any other type of graphic novel: If it’s a good story, well executed,
and with appropriate marketing and promotional support, then it can do
just fine.”

Arguably the most controversial manga publisher in the US, the company
started off by publishing manga titles licensed from Kodansha and other
Japanese manga publishers. However, when the Del Rey-Kodansha pact was
announced in 2003, TokyoPop embarked on a massive re-branding campaign,
focusing more on Original English Language (OEL) or global manga
properties created by non-Japanese (read: US and other countries)
creators. However, the company recently restructured its business operations and we talked to their OEL creators in parts one, two and three.

Nevertheless, the company remains optimistic about the Kodansha USA
news. “I just returned from ALA [the American Library Association]
(where the librarians love manga!) and I saw the official news about
Kodansha -- it reminded me of the announcement of a few years ago when
Kodansha and Del Rey announced their partnership, which helped to grow
the market,” Associate Publisher Marco F. Pavis said. “We expect this
move to have a similar impact on the U.S. market during these
challenging times. We will continue to work with Kodansha on various,
innovative projects. Our relationship goes back more than ten years --
as you know, TokyoPop and Kodansha helped to launch manga in the U.S.,
and a number of their series are still among our bestsellers, including
The Twelve Kingdoms, Samurai Deeper Kyo, and Rave Master
(I can't wait to meet Mashima-san at San Diego Comic-Con). Overall, we
welcome Kodansha to join us as we continue to build the category.

“Apropos specific titles (you brought up Beck, one of my
faves), I am not able to provide any further information until such
time as all the rights holders have been met with and we've discussed
the situation with them. I really appreciate your understanding -- we
really want to take into consideration our relationships with our
partners and creators, many of whom we've worked with for years and
have spent many a late night creating some of the finest manga to date.
A number of people asked me about this at AX, too,” Pavis concluded.

Dark Horse has been publishing manga for more than a decade now. Other
than the titles licensed from Kodansha, the company has also published
works by the “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, Metropolis), the legendary Kazuo Koike (Lone Wolf and Cub, Samurai Executioner, Crying Freeman, Lady Snowblood, Path of the Assassin), Katsuhiro Otomo (Domu: A Child’s Dream), Masamune Shirow (Orion, Black Magic), Katsuya Terada (The Monkey King), Hiroya Oku (Gantz), Kouta Hirano (Hellsing), Kentarō Miura (Berserk), Yasuhiro Nightow (Trigun), Eiji Otsuka and Shou Tajima (MPD Psycho), and many others.

Now, before anyone jumps the gun and says that Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Frank Miller’s 300, Sin City and Paul Chadwick’s Concrete
are OEL manga works, Scott Allie, who is Dark Horse’s Senior Managing
Editor, has this to say: “[T]he only way in which the term OEL manga
makes any sense to me is when you have Americans stylistically copying
manga. To apply that term to Hellboy is bizarre. Comics are, as
the saying goes, an original American artform. Japan loves that
artform, and calls it manga. We don't need to import the word
back in from Japan. It'd be like calling Tex Avery original
English-language anime, or Benny Goodman original American ジャズ. It's
just jazz, man. And the effects of this Kodansha move would have been more staggering had it happened at the peak of manga's popularity.”

The publisher’s manga guru Carl Horn told
the audience at this past weekend’s Anime Expo 08 that the Kodansha
news affects “certain of our titles" and that they’re “aware of the
rumors, but for licensing reasons, we can't tell you which ones."

On June 20, fellow editor Philip Simon “popped in” on the official Dark Horse Manga message boards to “confirm that our (direct market comic book store) on-sale date for Eden
(Volume 11) is February 4, 2009! Kumar's well into translating this
volume, and I'll post again when it's time to let your local comic book
retailer know that it's orderin' time!

“Thanks to everyone who's been supporting Eden -- I'll be here fighting to keep it endless.”

Following the Kodansha announcement, Comics212’s Chris Butcher reported that he has “independently confirmed that there is no reprint of Akira currently scheduled for North America, though there was one announced a month or two back.”

With Warner Bros. and Appian Way, the production company of actor Leonardo DiCaprio, turning Akira into two live-action feature films, the first of which is being fast tracked for release in summer 2009, it’s a no-brainer that somebody has to reprint the entire six-volume Akira
manga. And isn’t DC Comics a subsidiary of Warner Bros.? Furthermore,
DC also has its own manga line, CMX, which was launched in 2004…